A few websites have wanted their users to experience smooth scrolling badly enough that they've relied on a JavaScript library to provide it. Such libraries consume all wheel events and implement their own scrolling animation. Now that all major browsers natively support smooth scrolling, you should no longer depend on these libraries. They have the major disadvantage of being bad for scroll performance (they defeat browser's threaded scrolling optimizations). If that's not enough, we're hoping to fix a bug in blink that old versions of a popular SmoothScroll.js library accidentally depended on, and when we do that any sites still using it will stop scrolling with mouse and keyboard entirely! See http://crbug.com/501568 for details.﻿

Your application runs buttery smooth on your local machine -- good work! But, how does it perform on your users device out in the real world? To answer that, we need real user measurement (RUM) for RAIL + API's that will help us adapt and optimize the experience at runtime.

Gave a brief talk at the Chrome Dev Summit yesterday with an overview of the various efforts we've been working on to address these needs! Have questions or feedback? Let me know!

"Variation is creative, it pioneers the advance; standardization is conservational, it seizes the advance and establishes it as an actual concrete fact…. Standardization is thus the liberator that relegates the problems that have already been solved to their proper place, namely to the field of routine, and leaves the creative faculties free for the problems that are still unsolved. Standardization from this point of view is thus an indispensable ally of the creative genius."

Just as insightful as to the most effective use of modern web standards as it was when written nearly a century ago. [Albert Whitney, “The Place of Standardization in Modern Life”, 1924]